Velocity

count off the five minutes.”
    “I can count them with the watch on my wrist.”
    “Putting it on the railing is a signal to him that the countdown has started.”
    Woods to the north, shadowy and cool in the hot day. Green lawn, then tall golden grass, then a few well-crowned oaks, then a couple of houses down-slope and to the east. To the west lay the county road, trees and fields beyond it.
    “He’s watching now?” Billy asked.
    “He promised he would be, Mr. Wiles.”
    “From where?”
    “I don’t know, sir. Just please, please take off your watch and prop it on the railing.”
    “And if I won’t?”
    “Mr. Wiles, don’t talk that way.”
    “But if I won’t?” Billy pressed.
    His baritone rasp thinned to a higher register as Cottle said, “I told you, he’ll take my face, and me awake when he does. I told you.”
    Billy got up, removed his Timex, and propped it on the railing so that the watch face could be seen from both of the rocking chairs.
    As the sun approached the zenith of its arc, it penetrated the landscape and melted shadows everywhere but in the woods. The green-cloaked conspiratorial trees revealed no secrets.
    “Mr. Wiles, you’ve got to sit down.”
    Brightness fell from the air, and a chrome-yellow glare hazed the fields and furrows, forcing Billy to squint at numberless places where a man could lie in the open, effectively camouflaged by nothing more than spangled sunlight.
    “You won’t spot him,” Cottle said, “and he won’t like it that you’re trying. Come back, sit down.”
    Billy remained on his feet at the railing.
    “You’ve wasted half a minute, Mr. Wiles, forty seconds.”
    Billy didn’t move.
    “You don’t know what a box you’re in,” Cottle said anxiously. “You’re gonna need every minute he’s given you to think.”
    “So tell me about the box.”
    “You have to be sitting down. For God’s sake, Mr. Wiles.” Cottle wrung his voice as a worried old woman might wring her hands. “He wants you sitting in the chair.”
    Billy returned to the rocking chair.
    “I just want to be done with this,” Cottle said. “I just want to do what he told me and get out of here.”
    “Now you’re the one wasting time.”
    One of the five minutes had passed.
    “All right, okay,” Cottle said. “This is him talking now. You understand? This is him.”
    “Get on with it.”
    Cottle nervously licked his lips. He slipped the pint from his coat, not seeking a taste at the moment, instead clutching it with both hands, as if it were a talisman with the occult power to lift the fog of whiskey that blurred his memory, ensuring that he would deliver the message clearly enough to save his face from being pickled in a jar.
    “ ‘I will kill someone you know. You will select the target for me from people in your life,’” Cottle quoted. “ ‘This is your chance to rid the world of some hopeless asshole.’”
    “The twisted sonofabitch,” Billy said, and discovered that both of his hands were fisted, with nothing to punch.
    “ ‘If you don’t select the target for me,’” Cottle continued quoting, “ ‘I will choose someone in your life to kill. You have five minutes to decide. The choice is yours, if you have the balls to make it.’”
     
     
     

Chapter 22
     
    The effort to recall the precise wording of the message reduced Ralph Cottle to a hive of buzzing nerves. Countless anxieties swarmed through him and were glimpsed in his darting eyes, in his twitching face, in his trembling hands; Billy could almost hear the thrumming wings of dread.
    While Cottle had recited the freak’s challenge and conditions, with the penalty of death hanging over him if he got them wrong, the pint bottle had been a talisman with the power to inspire, but now he needed the contents.
    Staring at the wristwatch on the porch railing, Billy said, “I don’t need five minutes. Hell, I don’t even need the three that’re left.”
    Without intention, by not going to the police and getting them involved, he had already contributed to the death of one person in his life: Lanny Olsen. By his inaction, he had spared the mother of two, but he had doomed his friend.
    Lanny himself had been partly if not largely responsible for his own death. He had taken the killer’s notes and had destroyed them to save his job and his pension, at the cost of his life.
    Nevertheless, some of the blame lay with Billy. He could feel the weight; and always would.
    What the freak demanded of